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Who was Cassandra?

In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well, you know what happened.

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November 07, 2017

The Orange Line has fancy new cars, and whenever I get on one of these shiny trains, I feel like I must be one of the first passengers. That's why when I sat down early yesterday morning, it was a surprise that the empty seat was warm. I hadn't seen anyone exit, so they must have gotten off at a previous station. Of course, I told myself, thousands of people have already taken this train, it is no longer brand new. But the strange feeling of someone else's presence persisted, along with my musings about the places our bodies temporarily occupy in an urban environment, only to be replaced by another anonymous body, and another.

When I am on the train, I'm often going downtown to sing, or returning from singing, and though I seldom wear earphones or use my phone, bits of music play repetitively in my head. Yesterday I was going to the cathedral to sing a complex modern Mass in the morning, and later, music by Orlando Lassus, and I have noticed that this awareness sometimes makes me feel special. But the warmth of the empty seat, and the presence of the other passengers, reminded me that no one is any more special than anyone else, or, rather, that we are all equally special, even though I may have been the only person on the train who was thinking that.

The Montreal metro platforms aren't crowded on Sunday mornings, but as the trains arrive, they make me think of Mexico City, where the opening and closing mouths of each train disgorge and swallow up vast quantities of human beings. There, too, I often remember Thomas Merton's words: "What if everyone knew that they were going around shining like the sun?"

Merton wrote those words after having a spiritual experience -- a revelation of oneness -- on a street corner in Louisville, Kentucky, one day when he had left his monastery of Gethsemanii for a medical appointment or some similar reason. I had a similar revelation while waiting at a deli counter in a grocery store in Hanover, New Hampshire, nearly twenty-five years ago, and from that point on I have known that I am connected to every other being; that we all possess, at our core, the same divine spark (Merton called it "the eternal diamond"); and at the same time, that we are each entirely unique, special, precious, beloved. It's not explainable in words, and so I will not try; it's better (while still being impossible) to try to live out of that awareness in all of one's relationships. But it is also clear to me, as it was to Merton, that most of humanity goes around unaware of who they actually are, and of the potential for love, compassion, harmony, beauty and joy for which we are made. Babies come into the world open and trusting and full of potential -- but then other people and the world begin to impinge, and the separation, alienation, and undermining begin, accompanied by a gnawing hunger for love and for something ineffable that we sense is out there. All our lives, we remember the grandmother or father, the teacher, the friend who saw the spark within us when we were young, who saw us as we really were, who recognized and tried to nurture the best in us. And all our lives we suffer because of those who did, and do, the opposite. Under good circumstances, or sometimes against all odds, some people find their way and manage to live lovingly toward others and toward themselves, in spite of setbacks. Most struggle. And a few slip into the darkness and become capable of terrible things.

--

We can blame society, parents, religious institutions, educational and justice systems, the economic situation into which we were born, racism, homophobia, misogyny: all are part of the systems that maim and destroy people. Today I read a number or articles about guns in America that sought to prove that gun control was the answer to that country's epidemic of violence. But until a society looks beyond the gun to the hand that holds it, into the mind that picked it up and felt the need to buy it, and beyond that mind into the forces that not only made the gun easily available but created the desire to be prepared to shoot and kill, there is absolutely no hope for change.

Let's be clear. This is a country that fought a devastating, bloody, and still unresolved civil war war over the right of certain human beings to own and enslave other human beings. It is a country that committed genocide on the native peoples. It is a country that has treated all its "enemies" who were not white and European as sub-human and unequal, and still does -- and steadfastly refuses to discuss any of this history or to acknowledge the legacy of violence, injustice, and inequality that is interwoven and perpetuated in its national narrative. America definitely needs gun control. But what it needs more is a gigantic mirror.

Thomas Merton's life and thinking were profoundly influenced by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the nuclear arms race, which he saw as potentially the most terrible development in human history, not just because of its ability to create Armageddon, but because of what the existence of such weapons does to the human psyche. Merton was born in 1915 and died, accidentally, at age 53 in 1968. I was a teenager then, certainly influenced by growing up just after WWII, by the Cuban Missile crisis and the continuation of the nuclear arms race, then by the Vietnam War and the social upheaval of those times. My life has already been a decade longer than Merton's. I've seen the failure of the anti-war movement to significantly endure past the mid 1970s, and have been dismayed by the rise of corporate power, the increasing disparity of wealth and opportunity, the militarization of American society, the persistent threat of nuclear war, and the incredible lack of compassion for immigrants and anyone who is "other", as well as our own poor and disenfranchised. The wrong turn after 9/11 has plunged the world into much greater instability and fear, and gravely altered American society: much of what we are seeing today has felt predictable to me for a very long time.

And yet, the sense persists that humanity evolves on a time frame that I cannot see or comprehend. I've just been reading some ancient history, about Greek and Roman city-states in other parts of the Mediterranean. The cruelty of the tyrants and states in those days was on a scale that we can barely imagine. When a city was conquered, its entire population was often destroyed, or sold into slavery. And these were not uncivilized or unsophisticated people, they were often, as the writer put it, "educated people who spoke Greek and simply ran afoul of the massive inferiority complex of the Romans toward the Greek world." We don't physically enslave entire populations now, or crucify 6,000 slaves along the nation's most prominent highway, as the Romans did after a rebellion. We do other things that, on the surface, at least, seem less devastating and less cruel. 2,000 years of history have not taught a majority of human beings to share, or to lose, or to resolve difficulties without resorting to violence in our words or actions toward others, or by turning that energy against ourselves in destructive ways we don't even recognize.

--

So I am not particularly optimistic about humanity in general in the short term, but individuals can actually live differently if we are willing to keep our eyes and hearts open, and resist the temptation of following the herd. We can do a great deal for one another to make these times more bearable, especially if our relationships go deeper than the general discourse on social media. We can find strength as well as solace in the arts, in our work, in the natural world, in learning, in openness to difference and ways and people we do not know. We can learn to see and refuse the violence in our own selves, nipping it before it flowers into malevolence that affects our own spirit and those around us. We can try to be the people who see the best in each other, and encourage that, especially in the young.

October 16, 2017

Last night, a phenomenon unfolded on Facebook and Twitter, as one woman after another changed her status to "Me Too" or #MeToo, announcing publicly that she had at one time been sexually harassed or assaulted. I posted my own "Me Too" around 8:00 pm, and watched as friend after friend followed suit. Dave Bonta called it "a harrowing evening." Yes, but I was not as surprised as some of the few men to comment have been. Neither were the other women. Why? Because we've all known, or at least suspected, how endemic this is, and how difficult and futile it has been to speak out about it in our own lives. Even so, as I saw the status updates from women I've known and cared about, online or in person, my primary emotion was sorrow. I could handle the fact that it had happened to me, not once but several times. But seeing that it had also happened to so many dear female friends made me weep. "It's practically all of us," I wrote to a friend in Nova Scotia. "I am so sorry. Me too," I wrote to many others, and many wrote the same to me.

It has been painful, but freeing, to see this groundswell of courage and solidarity. If the revelations about Harvey Weinstein and the American Groper-in-Chief have contributed to women's solidarity on this issue, that is at least one good thing.

Then came the predictable push-backs: that we need to point out that most men are good, or that really the hash tag should be "all of us" because many men have been abused too, or that feminism has caused a lot of anger which has been directed at men and is a form of harassment.

One writer who thinks hard about these things said she was uncomfortable because "this puts the onus of speaking out / creating change on the women who've experienced harassment or assault instead of on the men who did the harassing or assaulting."

On the first points, yes, of course most men are not perpetrators. I've always had good men in my life who have loved and treated me gently. But we don't need to say that right now, and we don't need to apologize or add disclaimers: this is not about them. Why can't we hear people speaking out about a specific abuse or oppression and simply put ourselves aside for a moment and empathize with the victim and what she is saying, at significant cost to herself, and the effect it has had on her life?" Black Lives do Matter. Indigenous Lives Matter. Women's Lives Matter. Each of these should be a very simple concept. It is not about "Your Life Matters" or "All Lives Matter;" it is about acknowledging racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia and other abuses for what they are, and sitting with that, and with those who have suffered. Period. I don't expect black or indigenous people to offer me a disclaimer, nor should they. I will write a post about empathy in the future, it's something I've been wanting to do.

But for now, I want to address just the last point. As for being uncomfortable with placing women in the position of speaking out, I think we don't need to worry. Women have already shown how strong and resilient we are; we have survived millennia of being treated as property, used, harassed, and assaulted -- and then shamed and blamed. We have endured unequal opportunity, unequal pay, unequal education, glass ceilings -- and verbal abuse for being strong, smart, accomplished, and capable. We have borne children, kept food on the table and home life together while also working jobs; we've nursed the sick and dying, and cared for the elderly and the weak in the face of wars and famines and refugee crises. I think we can handle speaking out, and furthermore, we have to seize this moment and do so.

It is a delusion to expect the people, whether male or female, who hold, benefit from, and use sexual power to be the ones to correct the system: that has never worked in the history of the world. What works is when sufficient numbers of an oppressed or victimized group finally have enough courage to speak out about what has happened to them, and to stand up together for openness, transparency, and change.

In this moment of revelation, courage, and solidarity among ordinary women -- like me, and like your own sister, wife, mother, daughter, colleagues and friends -- there are just a few appropriate responses for men and women alike: "I am so sorry that happened to you. I applaud your courage. We need to do better as we raise our children." Down the road, we need to change a great deal about our society, but it starts with telling the truth about what has happened to us so that the magnitude of the problem can be revealed.

August 16, 2017

President Trump's remarks in support of the alt-right are worse than despicable: they signal what is to come if he stays in office. I've just written or called all the members of the Vermont congressional delegation, where I vote, and I urge you to do the same. If I were in the U.S. today I'd be out on the street with a protest sign and working with whatever coalitions I could on behalf of all marginalized people -- which means everyone who is not white, straight, and male.

It's absolutely incredible to me that America has a president who openly supports neo-Nazis and white supremacists with so little effective opposition. It is not surprising to me that he was elected, or that these elements in American society have come out into the open, because I have always known they were there; only those who have existed in homogeneous, naive, privileged bubbles could have missed this in their lives in America. Yes, the Democrats and a few Republicans have managed to block his legislation, and the courts have overruled his most egregious anti-immigration orders, but where are the people who will actually finally stand up and stop this? Where is our own Desmond Tutu, Martin Luther King? Where is the present-day Edward R. Murrow, speaking out against McCarthyism? But let's not stop there. Where and who are you? Because the time has come when each of us must face the decision to stand on the sidelines, or to actively resist, shelter, and protect those who are being persecuted: Jews and Muslims, people of color and of non-European ethnicity, the poor, women who are not protected by their wealth or association with white men.

And I'm sorry, but isn't enough to write hand-wringing Facebook and Twitter posts to our like-minded friends, or even blog posts like this. Are you willing to go to Washington, or to protest neo-Nazi book burnings in your city, or police brutality against blacks, or hate crimes against Jews or Muslims? Are you willing to go to city hall, to write letters, to organize your neighbors, to stand on a street corner with a sign, to call and write your representatives not just once but every week? Are you willing to protect, comfort, and shelter those who are and will be persecuted?

I've been an advocate and activist for peace and non-violence all my life, but I do believe that there are values worth fighting to protect. My own father, still living, risked his life as a tank driver in WWII to fight against the fascism that Trump is now championing. I just spent a weekend with five Jewish people my age whose families came to America from Germany, Austria, Russia, and Egypt to escape the Nazis; some members did not survive. My mother-in-law's family was killed in the Armenian genocide; my father-in-law's Arab family only survived the Ottoman persecutions of Christians because a Muslim leader protected them; they immigrated to America, were educated and assimilated, and now face prejudice and persecution. Where does it end? What an irony and obscenity it is to have a president, 80 years later, whose definition of American "greatness" has nothing to do with freedom and equality for all people, but instead bases his definition on rampant capitalism, exclusion, racism, homophobia, misogyny and privilege solely for the benefit of wealthy white males exactly like himself.

Do not kid yourself: 80 years after that World War, there is a war for the soul of western democracy. Which side are you on, and what are you willing to do? People everywhere -- white people in particular -- and not just in the U.S., have to speak up, stand up, and demand that our democracies work the way they are supposed to. One thing I have learned in my own fairly long life is if you wait for "the system" to quietly fix things on its own, nothing will happen, and the voices of fear will always drown out the voices of justice, fairness, and reason. A government of the people, by the people and for the people only works when the people themselves stand up for what is right, and not only demand the changes they want to see but make the decision to BE and LIVE as courageous people of justice and inclusion in the face of dark forces.

August 15, 2017

We've just returned from ten days on the New England coast, first for the wedding of J.'s sister on the Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, then a few days in Boston, and finally a reunion of a few of J.'s college friends on Block Island, off the Rhode Island coast between Long Island and Cape Cod. I've come back browner and more relaxed, with several bags of shells, bones and pebbles collected on the various beaches; happy about renewed friendships and new beginnings; and dismayed about political events.

There was a beautiful wedding of two people, both widowed after long, happy marriages, who have found each other now and decided to spend the rest of their lives together.

There was a house full of beloved relatives, above a rocky shell-strewn beach, where we made a party for the whole family one night, and the sun created a spectacle across the bay.

There were long walks on the beach and along the salt marches, with white egrets and gulls, and ospreys carrying fish in their talons, and stranded horseshoe crabs from prehistory, and regular crabs and mussels, and seaweed to nibble on, and the sound of the sea as we fell asleep, and in the night, and when we woke.

And this, from my journal:

One night, a nightmare: a party of friendly strangers turned dark, and I became hunted to the death by Trump's armed henchmen. I woke, tried to dismiss the sticky cobwebs of the dream, fell back asleep only to re-enter the same party, except now the men were strangling the women, one by one.

We're staying on Poppasquash Neck, a small peninsula in Narragansett Bay settled just after the Plymouth Colony was established. Narragansett is an irregular network of rocky coastline, islands, large peninsulas and and these smaller ones known as "necks." The larger Bay, named after one of the two native tribes of this region, has three divisions that the English settlers named Prudence, Patience, and Hope; their main settlement became the city of Providence. But not far from here is the site of the assassination of Matacomet, also known as King Philip, the chief of the Wampanoag tribe, who - unlike his conciliatory father - saw the true intentions of the white settlers and went to war against them. The English namers -- my own ancestors were of similar stock and time -- were served well by Prudence, Patience, and Hope, and it's their stone walls and old orchards, white-sailed boats, flag-bunting-festooned old houses, and wealth that have created the visual identity of this place.

The serenity is so studied and so well established it disturbs me, and so I walk on the beach of weathered slipper shells, scallops and quahogs: more comfortable in that graveyard, and the longer timeline of the sea.

July 25, 2017

The following conversation with my father-in-law occurred almost a decade ago, but whenever I see green almonds in the market, they remind me of him, and I buy a few -- though I probably like looking at them more than eating them. This year, I drew and painted some.

--

Green Almonds

"Such grapes we had from my uncle's vineyards in Bludan!" he exclaimed.

"What else?" I asked.

"Figs, apples..."

"Are you hungry now?"

"Not hungry, but I feel like I want to eat."

"You mean, just have something to chew on?"

"Yes," he smiled, as if he was relieved someone understood, but when the three of us suggested several things, he just shook his head no, smiling rather sadly.

"He's been asking for nuts today but he refuses what I offer," the caregiver said. She was a young woman of twenty-two or so, pretty, with dark hair and eyes, wearing large star-shaped earrings.

"What kind of nuts have you been thinking about?" I asked him.

"Green almonds."

"Ah! I've seen them but never eaten any. How do you do it?"

He explained how you crack and remove the outer covering, to reveal another shell that has to be removed in turn. "Sounds like a lot of work," I said.

"Yes, but that's the point. You sit and do it all day... We got those in Bludan too, there were lots of different kinds of nuts in my uncle's orchard."

"I'll look this week and see if I can find you any, sometimes they have them at the market."

He seemed to sleep again after this burst of conversation, and then opened his eyes. "Tell me," he said, lowering his voice just slightly and giving a small nod toward the caregiver who sat at the desk a mere six feet away. "Do you think this is a Bludani girl?"

--

Green almonds in a chased copper and silver Damascene bowl from the family home in Syria.

We did bring him some almonds a few weeks after this conversation, for his 99th birthday. He was quite frail at that point, but his eyes lit up when he saw the fuzzy green nuts in my hands. "What do I do now?" I asked. He told me where to find a hammer, and I went out on his balcony and hit one of the almonds along its seam, as he had explained. Because they are green and relatively soft, I found out that you have to give them a decisive whack it the right place, and then the nut will open to reveal an inner, thin brown covering, with the nearly-white almond inside. (More recently, I've discovered that a regular nutcracker does a much cleaner job, but it isn't nearly as satisfying as the hammer.) My father-in-law looked delighted, and he worked over the cracked shells to extract the nuts with his slow fingers, put them one by one in his mouth, and happily ate them.

He died a month later, nine years ago today -- July 25, 2008.

Since January, I've been working on a manuscript adapted and expanded from those posts, under the title The Fig and the Orchid, to finally make it into a book. I'm thinking of illustrating it with drawings like the ones here. My father-in-law was a Syrian immigrant to America in the late 1940s: he was a teacher, scholar of Arabic culture and language, a Unitarian minister, writer, thinker -- and a larger-than-life character. Considering world events, it seems like a good time for such a project. I know that some of you here have been along for this ride a long time, and read those posts about him long ago, for others this is a new subject. Would you be interested in such a book? What would make it the most compelling for you?

July 19, 2017

For the past couple of weeks, I've been painting shells that I've collected in recent years on the beaches near St. Augustine. First, three small watercolors, each one of a different scallop, with a tiny smooth shell beneath. On July 4, I started a much larger painting, of many shells, arranged on a plain page; the impetus for this arrangement seemed to come from some deeper place in my subconscious. Why? I wondered, as I finalized the composition and set pencil to paper. What am I doing here?

The Fourth of July came on the heels of two other national holidays - Quebec's St-Jean-Baptiste on June 24, and Canada Day on July 1. The separatists always come out in force for LaFêteSt-Jean, along with the less-political French-Canadians who simply want to celebrate their heritage. By contrast, Canada - which turned 150 this year - barely seems to know what to do to celebrate itself, since the question "What is Canada?" often yields only amorphous answers, or stereotypes involving parkas, snowshoes, hockey, and beer.

On Canadian holidays I still feel mostly like the observer and recent, mid-life immigrant that I am. We went down to the Jacques-Cartier bridge on Canada Day to watch the fireworks, and the moment they finished, the heavens opened and there was torrential rain, drenching the thousands of people on the bridge in a few minutes. I looked around: as usual for the fireworks, here was a microcosm of Montreal: French and English-speakers, Indians, Asians, Middle-Easterners, Africans; older people like ourselves, family groups, teenagers in packs, couples with small children and babies. Everyone was laughing and chattering in their own languages, and smiling at the strangers near them. The initial dash to get off the bridge soon turned to a slow splashing stroll, and a kind of collective merriment. I was so wet I could feel water streaming down my legs inside my jeans from my soaked underwear; like almost everyone else, we had no umbrella, no hoods or jackets. By the time we finally got to our bikes, at the end of the bridge, the downpour had stopped, and we cycled home. Now, that experience seemed Canadian: the lack of drama or hysteria, the acceptance of nature's unpredictability, the good mood in the face of it. But you can't encapsulate that, it's merely a feeling, one that I not only recognize from being here for more than a decade, but share -- like a lot of other inexpressible things about Canada and Quebec -- because it feels natural to who I am, to who I've always been.

America, on the other hand -- what was anyone to make of July 4th this year? The celebratory spirit seemed muted, but I felt even more removed than usual, and wrote to a friend that I felt I was "done with nationalisms of any kind."

Instead I stood at my work table that day and made the careful, detailed under-drawing for the new painting, and thought about the beach above St Augustine: a shell beach, with a perfect gradation from intact shells close to the water's edge, to smaller and smaller water-worn pieces, and finally coarse shell-sand forming the dunes. Each one of those shells, I realized, represented one organism, one life, in numbers that seemed much more profound than the clichéd impossibility of "counting the grains of sand." Who was I, I wondered, in the face of all those lives that had been lived: one human in the year 2017, bending down to pluck a dozen shells from the beach and put them into her pocket to bring back to Canada, far to the north, a cold place surrounded my frigid oceans where not one of those organisms could have survived for very long?

Maybe, I thought, the multiple shells in the new painting represented some sort of subconscious move away from a focus on the individual, brought on by my reflections about July 4th and America. The shells are a sample that represents an entire beach, which in turn is a sample that represents the life of an ocean. They have characteristics and vital needs in common, yet are extraordinary and beautiful in their uniqueness.

Later, though, as I worked, I began to realize that the shells in the painting were also symbols for me of the refugees who have arrived on Mediterranean beaches, both dead and alive: people we have labelled collectively but who are -- as a few striking images have shown us - individuals with personal and deeply-affecting stories.

I wrote more about nationalism, immigration, and politics, but on re-reading deleted it: too heavy-handed, and maybe even too obvious.

Let's just say that the more I travel and the more people I meet from all over the world -- all of us arriving, some more battered than others, on these beaches of our lives -- the more I see my personal story as one of many, and that our shared humanity is a far greater connection than any arbitrary division, especially when it is those divisions that are so often responsible for conflict and exodus. I'm much more interested these days in trying to express my feelings about the interconnected world, which includes the preciousness of each anonymous human and non-human life. As the poet Gary Snyder wrote: “The size of the place that one becomes a member of is limited only by the size of one’s heart.”

May 26, 2017

Lately I've been going through old blog posts from around the time we were moving between Vermont and Montreal, before we'd made the decision to move permanently, as source material for a possible project. This morning I've been reading posts from the winter of 2004-2005, and it gives me no pleasure to see further evidence of why I named my blog "The Cassandra Pages." Here's one such paragraph, written on January 19, 2005, the day before George Bush was inaugurated for his second term:

"I disagree with much of the American left, who seem to feel that if they only can regroup, "reach out" and spin their message differently, the balance will shift to them. This is, I feel, both naive and limited, and except for a few outstanding individuals, it will have neither authenticity nor sufficient authority to really change policy or opinion at a root level - either in Washington or in the heartland. The true change required is enormous, and will take generations: it has to take place in the American psyche - including the hearts of many who "vote Democratic" but live lives that are exploitative and consumptive and do not embrace truly understand the diversity and interdependence of our world. Even more difficult, that change of heart has to include conquering the power of fear."

I wrote a long political post about current times that I've just deleted; I'll leave it at that, and you can draw your own conclusions.

April 22, 2017

Today I've been thinking back to the very first Earth Day in 1970. I was a senior in high school, and on that day we went over for a program at the new Rogers Environmental Education Center that was being built in my rural central New York town. It was an entirely new concept: an "environmental education center" under the auspices of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, built on property that had once been a state "game farm" raising pheasants, quail, turkeys and other game birds for release on state lands for hunting. During my childhood, this was a place we went for picnics and to see the enormous native trout in the concrete ponds, feed the wild ducks, keeping a safe distance from mated pairs of Canada geese protecting their offspring, and wander around the cages that housed displays of "fancy" pheasants, game birds, and screeching peacocks.

On Earth Day, our class heard about concepts like recycling, sustainability, organic gardening, environmental pollution, and ecology, that were actually relatively terms at that time. The presenter was a charismatic state field biologist named Herm Weiskotten who had been hired as the center's first environmental educator. I loved everything I heard, and admired him, and that summer and for all the summers and some vacations through university I worked at the center as an intern. For two years after graduating I worked full-time as a naturalist and artist/exhibit and graphic designer under the CETA program, sharing an office with Herm, who had become my mentor, teacher, and friend. I was incredibly fortunate to know him and work so closely with him; he taught me a great deal, gave me confidence, and steadfastly encouraged me in my art and my love of the natural world. We went all over New York State together, laying out nature trails -- another new thing at the time -- and talking. I was responsible for sketching and drawing the illustrations for trail guides and exhibits, but Herm and I also shared a great love for native plants, especially the so-called primitive plants like ferns, mosses, horsetails, lichens and liverworts, and we searched together for rare species. During those years I'd work all day, come home, cook dinner for myself, and spend the evening in solitude practicing drawing and teaching myself how to paint detailed watercolors.

The field guide in the top picture was his. He gave it to me after it fell into a stream once when we were down in some gorge looking for limestone-loving ferns. The fern I've laid on the cover has always been pressed between its pages - it's an ebony spleenwort from one of those excursions. I took the book off the shelf today to see if it had Herm's name in it -- it doesn't -- but that's his handwriting inside the back cover: a note about where the species on pg 112 -- the silvery spleenwort, Athyrium thelypteroides -- was to be found.

He was born in England in 1922, orphaned, and adopted by American parents. He died in 1977 of a sudden, massive heart attack in his sleep; we had spoken by phone the night before with no hint of any serious problem, though he had had heart issues for a number of years. Now, almost ten years older than he was when he died, I still think of him nearly every day, and when I'm in the woods I feel his presence; I've sometimes wondered if his was a soul that didn't depart but has always stayed here, whether as a protective spirit or simply because he loved the earth too much to leave. I should write more about him someday -- there are hundreds of stories -- but I'm not sure I will, or really want to.

This warped and water-stained book is precious to me because it's one of the very few mementos I have. I have only a couple of photographs, none particularly good. The first gift he ever gave me was a paperback copy of Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac; he also gave me a large book of American Wildflowers. But mostly we constantly brought each other interesting things we'd found: fossils, rocks, bones, wildflowers, feathers. Not long before he died, he showed up at my parents' home at the lake -- I had moved to New England -- with a couple of Iroquois arrowheads that he said he wanted to give my mother and me - he loved to roam the freshly-plowed fields by the Chenango River after work, and often participated in archaeological digs in the area, looking for artifacts. But that's it. The most important things were the intangible ways he helped me discover and be myself.

How would Herm feel about our earth today? I hate to even think about that question. He'd be happy for the strides we've made in sustainability, recycling, organic farming and local food, waste disposal, and certain resources that have been protected and cleaned up. He'd be sick about the decline of species, blatant disregard for biodiversity, about genetic engineering, continued pesticide overuse, and all the abuses of creationism and non-science -- but most of all about climate change. He would despise the politicians and their wars, deplore religious fundamentalism of all kinds, and be dismayed about the refugees. He'd also be sad to see that New York State has closed all their popular and well-attended environmental centers, which educated two generations of students and teachers, for lack of funds and, frankly, lack of political will and commitment.

So much of my art and spirit spring from nature, my first and purest love. In much of my work, I realize I'm simply trying to say "Look!" with the same wonder and appreciation I did when leading people on nature walks, years ago. I was in love with the natural world even when I was a little girl; my mother and grandmother and aunts loved the outdoors and knew a lot about it. But it was Herm who gave me greater knowledge, a voice, and new ways to communicate what was inside me, and what was important. I thought I wanted to be a field biologist myself, for a long time, but my creative side won out; that's fine. But there's so much work to do, and so little time left; I feel the urgency, and the call to try harder -- those of us who are still here.

January 29, 2017

This is a guest post by my friend Vivian Lewin, who went to the Women's March in Washington last weekend, traveling from Montreal to a friend's house in Pennsylvania by car and then to D.C. Vivian and I met more than ten years ago through Christ Church Cathedral, and quickly realized we had much in common - being American, being writers and readers, loving textiles and sewing for just a few. She is a veteran of many marches, and we both wanted to share her experience and perspective here.

At 5:30 a.m. on January 21, 2017, the parking lot of Harrisburg Area Community College was already filling up when we arrived: Five people—two living nearby, two from Poughkeepsie, one from Montreal. We had all slept in Camp Hill, gotten up at four, eaten breakfast, and brought our lunches and charged-up phones/cameras to board a chartered bus and go to DC. A local woman who uses a walker joined us; the six of us managed to keep together all day.

Holly, Candice, Tom (wearing a hat made by Vivian), Bonnie, and Samantha

People kept arriving, forming a long line in the dark. It was chilly, but that’s not what gave me goosebumps. I’m a dual US Canadian citizen and a Florida voter. After having watched the US election by myself on November 20, and having listened to the Inauguration Day coverage in the car alone on my drive from Montreal the day before, it seemed like a miracle to be in the company of like-minded women and men. I thrilled to think how many other parking lots were filling, how many other groups of people were converging on Washington. How many buses rolling through the night—some from Canada. How many friends and relations had sent us off with pink pussyhats (thank you, cassandrabeth!) or prayers or sandwiches. “Take a few steps for me,” one friend wrote, and other emails arrived too. “Be safe.” “My thoughts are with you.” I was there for others, not just anonymous others but carrying the hopes of people I know.

I felt we all shared a resolve that this day be as deeply meaningful as we could make it. Knitting hats, making posters by hand, meditating, praying, reserving hotel rooms or arranging car shares takes forethought and a resolute determination.

We reached DC around 9:30. To get to the actual march we six walked through the enormous parking lot of RFK Stadium—full to capacity with tour buses— to the metro entrance with an elevator. People made way for Bonnie and her walker. The cars were filled with marchers—they applauded Bonnie—and our train took us near the Mall.

Bonnie and her walker: "“I bought this especially for today. It’s supposed to be good for rough terrain and only weighs 13 pounds.”

A woman in our metro car...

We emerged to find the street already filled with people. You’ve seen the photos. We only got that overview from the giant screens along the way. Gloria Steinem was talking. We walked towards the unseen stage until the crowd was too thick, then planted ourselves where we could watch a screen, and stood in front of it for hours under a leaden sky. The crowd—each person in it—was as inspiring as the speeches. We photographed each other—friends and strangers alike. The memorable speeches began to blur together.

I was tired. My feet hurt. Cell service was limited and nobody knew whether we would march, or where. One network said the march was cancelled but a security guy said it would go towards the Washington Monument. Slowly, we threaded our way in that direction, single file through the crowd. Eventually, the actual march crawled in that direction, too. I was pretty numb; the day became an endurance exercise. When an officer in a police car said we were over a million, I told my friends and one of them started to cry. Yes indeed, it was all worth it! I told random strangers (not really strangers any more) as they passed, just to see the joy on their faces. We sat on the curb to rest as the crowd poured past on their way to the Ellipse. “What does democracy look like?” one fellow called and the crowd bellowed back “THIS is what democracy looks like.” Nobody wanted to stop that chant.

My decision, early on, to go to Washington felt personal, stubborn, even helpless. What I could write or do that would be more useful? Was it a kind of pilgrimage? I’d say, in retrospect, that I went to witness my resolve. There’s a prophetic tradition of doing acts that seem absurd—that put the lie to worldly power. Amazing to experience such an act manifested in the sea of people who had, together, come.

There is much work to do. I’ve marched in other “protests” that felt angry, or giddy, or triumphant. I didn’t feel that way on Saturday. This is one for the long haul. As James Louder wrote this morning, “The enormities of Trump’s first week are so enormous and so diverse, so wantonly and widely destructive that the mind boggles before any attempt of analysis…”. So it’s good to hold on to the memory of this day. I know that my experience will keep me keeping on. (See also “Activism 101, and Regular Life” in the Cassandra Pages)

Vivian Lewin is a Montreal writer who grew up in Pennsylvania. She attended Oberlin (AB honors English) and the University of Florida (MFA creative writing). She is a dual citizen of Canada and the US, and is a Florida voter. Vivian has made poems and quilts during the course of her life and has taught quilting; now she is a spiritual director and Lay Reader in the Anglican church and also works with a Healing Pathway group.

January 23, 2017

The province of Quebec, with Montreal at lower center; image from Google Earth. James Bay and Hudson Bay at top left, Gulf of St Lawrence at far right, center.

A storm is coming.

I walked to work today, knowing it may be the last chance for a few days to walk quickly and easily on bare sidewalks. The sky is grey, low; the temperature just below freezing; the air slightly damp and still. Even without a weather report, northerners like me would be likely to say, "feels like it's going to snow."

Along Avenue Mont-Royal, I passed the jewelry shop where the bare fingers of a white mannequin waited for their ten o'clock adornment; past the bakery, always closed on Mondays, the librairie with its window display of mandala coloring books and blank notebooks covered in Italian papers, and stopped in at the Intermarché to buy a can of tuna for lunch. At the light I turned left and walked up Papineau, a wide boulevard full of commuter traffic, past the earnest early-morning exercisers on their treadmills at EnergieCardio, and through a zone of abandoned buildings, boarded up and pasted with film posters. There was an empty lot filled with snow and faced by a chain-link fence and a tangle of city barricades, the sort that get put up when there's a street closure for a march or a race, each bearing a vertical sign with the city's name and logo. Suddenly - was it that unexpected expanse of snow? the slight but insistent wind that I'd begun to feel after turning north? -- I felt the city not as a self-contained zone of urban activity, but as a vulnerable fortress set in a wild, raw landscape surrounding it on all sides. I immediately thought of the early French settlers, building a literal fortress near the river, the walls of which still remain: while it may have protected them from angry Hurons it certainly didn't do much against the harsh winters, except to give the colonists a place to huddle together with some protection from the wind.

I thought of other cities I love: Reykjavik, with no defense but evacuation, should Katla erupt; Mexico City, surrounded by volcanoes and devastated by the huge earthquake in 1985; New York, deluged by hurricane Sandy and vulnerable to rising ocean levels. Human beings have tried so valiantly to protect themselves from outside threats, all through history, whether it's by making walls or vaccines. Here, in the big cities, there is an illusion, maintained by concrete and glass and steel -- the mountains and valleys of our own construction that we populate and animate by artificial light and constant movement -- that we are in control, that this, not nature, is the true reality. Perhaps it's an illusion easier to perpetuate in more populated areas with gentler climates, where an entire life can be lived without venturing into life-threatening wildness, or even driving through it. Are far-northern cities and societies different, I wondered? Why have Canada and the Scandinavian countries committed themselves to such a high level of social welfare for their citizens? Is it merely wealth, or does something else, perhaps more elemental, contribute to a collectivist mentality? An awareness, chilled into our bones, that beyond this outpost are the vast forest and frozen tundra, the bears and the wolves, the unchecked arctic wind, the iceberg sea?